Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens? Christine Rosen

Are We Worthy of Our Kitchens? Christine Rosen One of the best recent advertising campaigns is for a new line of high- end washers and dryers made by General Electric. A supermodel and a dorky scientist collide on the street, falling unexpectedly in love, uniting brains and beauty, utility and aestheticism. The fruit of this union is the household appliance of the future—sophisticated, sleek, an electronic image of domestic bliss for our times. The perfect washer and dryer create the perfect family. Given the great range and power of our contemporary technologies, it is hardly surprising that our expectations for modern machines are especially high at home. We seek movie-quality entertainment with our oversized, flat-panel, high-definition televisions. We seek business- quality communication by installing satellite-powered Internet access in our home offices. We seek restaurant-quality kitchens with our six-burner stovetops and cappuccino-making machines. We want the latest high-tech contrivance or convenience, hoping that it will make old jobs easier, or that it will fulfill new longings we never knew existed. At the same time, some of the most remarkable household appliances are now so mundane that we rarely think of them as technologies at all. Consider—or reconsider—the washing machine. In many homes, it is relegated to the basement or some other hidden corner. It is used often but not given much attention by its owner unless it breaks. Most house- holds still have reasonably priced models, almost always in white, so loud and unattractive that they are kept out of public view. Despite its humble status, however, the electric washing machine represents one of the more dramatic triumphs of technological ingenuity over physical labor. Before its invention in the twentieth century, women spent a full day or more every week performing the backbreaking task of laundering clothes. Hauling water (and the fuel to heat it), scrubbing, rinsing, wringing—one nineteenth-century American woman called laundry “the Herculean task which women all dread.” No one who had the choice would relinquish her washing machine and do laundry the old-fashioned way. Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her new book My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood was just published by PublicAffairs Books. WINTER 2006 ~ 75 Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. CHRISTINE ROSEN Today, technology aids us in performing even the simplest domestic tasks. We have vacuums, juicers, blenders, dishwashers, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, bread machines, coffee makers, ice cream makers, food processors, microwave ovens, and much more. Yet if our domestic machines are more advanced than ever, it is unclear by what standard we should judge their success. Many people justify buying the latest household machine as a way to save time, but family life seems as rushed as ever. Judging by how Americans spend their money—on shelter magazines and kitchen gadgets and home furnishings—domesticity appears in robust health. Judging by the way Americans actually live, however, domesticity is in precipitous decline. Families sit together for meals much less often than they once did, and many homes exist in a state of near-chaos as working parents try to balance child-rearing, chores, long commutes, and work responsi- bilities. As Cheryl Mendelson, author of a recent book on housekeeping, observes, “Comfort and engagement at home have diminished to the point that even simple cleanliness and decent meals—let alone any deeper sat- isfactions—are no longer taken for granted in many middle-class homes.” Better domestic technologies have surely not produced a new age of domestic bliss. Ironically, this decline in domestic competence comes at a time of great enthusiasm for “retro” appliances and other objects that evoke experiences that many Americans rarely have. We seem to value our domestic gadgets more and more even as we value domesticity less and less. Wealthy Americans can purchase an expensive, “old-fashioned” cast-iron Aga stove, but they cannot buy the experience it is intended to conjure: a cozy kitchen filled with the scents and signs of a person devoted to the domestic satisfaction of those who share a home. And middle-class Americans can buy machines that aim to make their domestic chores more pleasurable or efficient, but the ideal of transforming domestic labor into a “lifestyle” is a fantasy. The machines promise to restore peace and comfort to domestic life, but such nostalgia (whose literal meaning is “homesickness”) is not a recipe for domestic happiness. The New Electric Servants If we are nostalgic for the idea of old-fashioned hearth and home, a brief history of housework will quash any longing for doing things the old-fashioned way. It is difficult to overstate the extraordinary physical challenge household labor posed before the creation of modern domestic 76 ~ THE NEW ATLANTIS Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR KITCHENS? technology. Cooking, cleaning, laundering, and caring for children— almost exclusively the lot of women—required considerable endurance, and exhaustion and injury were common. During her visit to the United States in the 1830s, the British writer Frances Trollope was appalled to find the country’s married women suffering from pallid complexions and poor posture that she attributed to their ceaseless domestic toil (although women’s lot was not much better in Trollope’s native Britain). Rapid changes occurred in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950. As historian Ruth Cowan notes, “Before 1860 almost all families did their household work in a manner that their forebears could have imitated”— that is, in a pre-industrial manner, with the benefit of certain simple tools but without the aid of sophisticated domestic technologies. By 1960, only those living in the poorest or most isolated communities lived this way. With minor modifications, improvements, and the addition of certain fea- tures, these early twentieth-century technologies are still the ones we use in the twenty-first century. One of the first domestic technologies to influence the American home was the wood- or coal-burning cast-iron cooking stove, first patented and regularly produced in the 1830s and found in many American homes by the 1850s. Like many domestic technologies that would follow, the new stoves saved labor, but mostly male labor. Since stoves burned fuel more efficiently than the open fireplaces that Americans previously used to pre- pare food, the constant demand for fuel-gathering was reduced. But since fuel-gathering was traditionally a task for men and older children, the stoves did little to alleviate the demands on women’s time. By the early twentieth century, many more new appliances were avail- able. The first motorized dishwasher was exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and by 1908, appliance manufacturers were offering electric ranges and electric dishwashers. Electric refrigerators followed in 1914. By 1920, electric sewing machines, electric irons, and the earliest vacuum cleaners appeared on the market. By the early 1940s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than half of all American homes had washing machines and refrigerators, and nearly half had vacuum cleaners. The editor of Common Sense in the Household, an early aficionado of the vacuum, described this “miraculous” technology as follows: “It is like play to see ravelings, lint, feathers, and hair and other scraps drawn into the maw of the cleaner and vanish from sight.” But as more appliances found their way into American homes, some- thing else began to find its way out of it: servants. In the nineteenth century, many middle class homes employed a servant to help with laun- WINTER 2006 ~ 77 Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information. CHRISTINE ROSEN dry and housekeeping, and advertisements for cleaning products often featured images of servants in starched aprons industriously polishing floors. By the early 1920s, far fewer Americans employed a servant, and they had all but disappeared from advertisements, replaced by pictures of ecstatic wives using their new “electric servants”—appliances. A Hoover vacuum ad from the 1920s featured a glamorous flapper in drop-waist satin dress and pearls, her wavy bob slickly coiffed and her eyes fixed on the floor as she enthusiastically vacuums. Many advertisements were overt in pushing their products as replace- ments for paid human labor. A 1938 ad for Hoover vacuums showed a housewife slumped in an armchair, broom by her side, thinking, “It’s so silly to go on wearing myself out when I can have a maid at 4d a day”—a “tire- less, dependable maid” called “the Hoover!” In their 1929 study, Middletown, Robert and Helen Lynd recorded the thoughts of one woman who found that “my labor-saving devices just about offset my lack of a maid.” But as the Lynds’ survey of Middletown housewives revealed, “a number feel that while the actual physical labor of housework is less...rising standards in other respects use up the saved time.” This claim was echoed by other domestic experts of the era. Writing in 1919, domestic efficiency expert Christine Frederick noted, “Increasingly high standards of sanitation in the home have made cleaning one of the most important divisions of housework.” Nevertheless, Frederick decreed, “there is no question of the economy in replacing the human by the mechanical servant.” American enthusiasm for new domestic appliances remained high into the 1950s, as soldiers returning from World War II married, set up house, and raised the baby boom generation. The automatic dishwasher was even a highlight of the impromptu debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow at the American National Exhibit in July 1959.

Load more